Main menu

Johnny Sauter kicked off a big weekend at Texas Motor Speedway with a win in the NASCAR Truck Series on Friday night. Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC

Johnny Sauter isn't known for his patience behind the wheel, but when you have a truck as good as his SealMaster Toyota was in Friday night's WinStar Casino 350 at Texas Motor Speedway, it's a little easier to wait for your openings.

Add to that the fact that Sauter won the June NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race here, too, and you can see why he took his time running down pole sitter Nelson Piquet, Jr., then Parker Kligerman for the victory.

Piquet's Turner Motorsports Chevrolet and his Turner teammate and points leader, James Buscher, shared the front row to start, but some early, comparatively minor damage to the rear fender of Buescher's Great Clips Chevrolet dropped him from contention to an 11th-place finish. Buescher, from nearby Plano, Texas, came into the race with a 21-point lead over Ty Dillon, but Dillon finished fifth, trimming Buescher's lead to 15 points.

“I felt really confident all day knowing we had the same truck and basically the same setup we had here in the spring,” Sauter said. A late adjustment to the chassis “made the truck just come alive. We were on cruise control the last 30 laps.”

To say the race was uneventful is an understatement. There were only two cautions--one for Ryan Blaney's blown tire, and one for German Quiroga's blown engine. Quiroga's truck is owned by Kyle Busch, who also had his own problems--electrical gremlins dropped him to mid-pack, but he rallied back to fourth.

Second-place Kligerman gave up a good lead to Sauter, as Sauter took four tires on the last green-flag pit stop, and Kligerman took only two. Sauter won the 147-lap race by 2.2 seconds over Kligerman, who was fading by nearly a half-second per lap. “He was just too fast for us at the end,” Kligerman said. Taking two tires was a last-second decision for the team--the jack man already had the truck raised, and had to drop it immediately. That pause could have cost them the win, “but we win or lose as a team,” Kligerman said.

Third-place Piquet battled handling challenges for the last half of the event. “The track changes a lot during the race,” Piquet said, “and we fought it the whole night--tight, loose, tight, loose.”

The race clinched the Manufacturer's Championship for Chevrolet, sweeping all three NASCAR titles.

With two events left, Buescher has 750 points, Dillon 735, and Timothy Peters, who finished 10th, has 725 points.